very helpful lioness

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Tracking the porting status of Drupal 7 modules

The number of sites running Drupal 7 has been steadily climbing over the past few months, and is now north of 140K sites. At the same time, the number of Drupal 6 sites has started to flat-line.

So if you haven't started yet, now's a great time to begin thinking about and planning your site's upgrade path to Drupal 7.

To assist with this task, there's an amazing, little-known module out there by sun called Upgrade Status, which is an essential tool in the site upgrade planning process. It will inspect the modules installed on your site give you a custom-tailored report about each of their porting status to the next version of Drupal. It also provides other upgrade helpers, such as a block with links that walk you step-by-step through the process of a major upgrade.

Obviously, though, the biggest barrier to doing D6 -> D7 site upgrades (apart from time, of course :)) is the porting status of contrib. So using the magic of Upgrade Status module's data I've set up a site at http://drupalcontribstatus.com/ to track the status of the top 60 contributed projects (the top 50 + 10 that were moved into core):

The intent of this site is to act as a dashboard for folks who want to help the module porting process happen faster. There are helpful links track the issues that block a D7 release (a convention established in a previous post), issues that need review, instructions for how to take over abandoned projects, and so on.

We're currently at 32 of 60 projects ported (though obviously, most of the betas/alphas of these modules are pretty solid or we wouldn't have 100K+ D7 sites...). Can we hit all 60 by the end of the year? :) Let's try! If every DrupalCamp between now and then focused on a few of these remaining modules, I bet we could do it!

PS: Feel free to use the Contrib Status module to set up your own site to publicly track and create momentum around specific modules you care about. But WARNING: The code was largely written between the hours of Stupid O'Clock and Why Are You Still Up Dummy, so I take no responsibility for it whatsoever. :P~ If you have ideas on how to make it better, please leave feedback in the issue queue!

That's an interesting site, but it's horribly out of date. I did a test on Drupal Commerce and it's saying it's still in beta3, which was released on April 23.

Even more troubling, though, is the fact that the site says beta modules are ready. I don't think a site should report beta modules as ready for use, as the term is used so loosely in Drupal that it could mean anything from "been around for months with no major problems" to "containing critical show stoppers that were fixed two months ago with no new release."

Because of the vast uncertainty, it would be better for the site to list the project as not ready but available for testing... which is what betas are "supposed" to be for anyways (hence the term beta tester : ).

Ok, but again the "recommended_major" variable is coming from which major release branch (i.e. 1.x, 2.x, etc.) I as a module maintainer recommend new users try out for a particular version of Drupal. It doesn't have anything to do with the readiness of a particular release, and unless I'm mistaken, there isn't a uniform practice of only marking a branch as the recommended branch if it's stable. Many of the modules still in alpha mark a recommended major branch. : )

At the end of the day... I don't suppose it matters. Good luck with the site, and make sure cron stays up. ; )

these are 2 great stats.. the number of sites in D7 and the number of your special 60 modules. But, there is a very important stat missing, i think, what is upgrade rate of the other 6000 modules?

At the time i wrote this there are around 6000+ D6 modules. And only about 2200 D7 modules. This is a very scary stat. Consider these points:

- of the 60 "special" modules, any given site maybe uses 20 or 30 of these (maybe even 40), and also uses 50 other modules not on that list. and over 10 projects those 50 "non-special" modules are likely from a group of 200-300.

- many of these modules, special or not, are feature "poor" compared to their D6 counterpart. Good example is VBO, which has many of it's built in Actions still to be ported.

- on the plus side... D7 core has many very cool features that deprecate many D6 modules; but that count is maybe 100 or so at best.. not 1000's

maybe we just need a simple site with a big green or red flag to let developers know if it is time to start using D7.. lol.. ok.. i know.. too many variables.